@Drunk Repub – Keeping conservatism alive with a little help from the grape and the grain

August 7, 2018

The press is the enemy of the people. Conservative white people that is.

Donald Trump’s relationship with the media has always been “strained” to say the least, but the beef went positively nuclear last week when the President took to Twitter (where else?) to declare the press the “enemy of the people.”

The insult did not go unnoticed by the Fourth Estate, which retaliated by unleashing a torrent of partisan rage and grilling the President’s daughter and Press Secretary in an attempt to discredit his claim.

It was a bold and divisive statement for sure, but one that recent events have proven to be at least partially true—for there can be little doubt that the press is openly waging war on white conservatives.

Consider the curious case of Sarah Jeong, the newest member of The New York Times’ editorial board whose vile anti-white tweets ignited a nasty public debate about the fundamental nature of racism.

The tweets were so hateful, and the backlash so severe, that even I, a particularly curmudgeonly conservative, was certain that Jeong would swiftly be shown the door (Twitter suspended the account of Turning Point USA’s Candace Owens after she replicated Jeong’s tweets but substituted the worked “black” for “white”). But that was not the case; rather The Times moved swiftly to defend their recent hire, blaming her open racism on the absurd notion that:

“. . . Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

They went on to assure us that Jeong “regrets it” and admitted, with zero pretense of shame, that they were well aware of the tweets when they hired her, stating: “We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history . . .”

The Times’ vociferous defense of Jeong’s bigotry was particularly peculiar given that the paper fired tech writer Quinn Norton, a mere seven hours after hiring her, the day before due to her own questionable Twitter history (Norton’s account did feature some horribly inappropriate language, though much of it was used ironically).

The obvious double standard did nothing to prevent prominent journalists and publications attaching themselves to Jeong’s cause, happily tossing aside what remnants of credibility they may have maintained for the sake of salvaging their comrade’s reputation.

Slate blamed Jeong’s tweets on “conservative trolls”; Yahoo insisted the tweets weren’t racist at all; The Verge claimed that the backlash against Jeong was simply an attempt “to discredit and undo the vital work of journalists who report on the most toxic communities on the internet,” and urged other publications to ignore similar allegations against their own unhinged staff.

There were plenty of others, nearly all of whom insisted that Jeong was simply responding to an environment in which most journalists are white, and that due to the Caucasian demographic’s prominence in society, whites cannot be victims of racism.

This claim is patently absurd of course: after all, Jewish people hold great power across the finance, media, and entertainment industries, yet nearly everyone recognizes anti-Semitism as legitimate discrimination.

Besides, by the media’s own pathetic logic, any racist can claim they are merely reacting to a particular environment when they say or do horrible things. Social media is a nasty dimension inhabited by bottom dwellers of all stripes, and everyone in the public sphere is the victim of harassment to some degree. Would Jeong’s defenders have rallied around Norton had she blamed her victims? I think not.

Most importantly, however, the media’s pathetic protection of Jeong demonstrates perfectly just how far the left will go to defend its own. When the very white men Jeong would gladly banish to some sort of racial leper colony come to her defense then reality has left the building. There is simply nothing sane, let alone objective, about an entire profession choosing self destruction over conservative dominance of D.C. and the culture war.

Of course, this suits liberals and minorities just fine. After all, they can say damn near anything and their sympathetic brethren will rush to their bully pulpits to slander those they’ve demonized.

But if you’re a conservative, particularly a white one, well . . .

Just ask Sarah Sanders, whose defense of Trump led an MSNBC host to openly call for her strangulation; or Kevin D. Williamson, who was recently fired from The Atlantic for suggesting years ago that the act of aborting a baby was equivalent to murder; or Roseanne Barr, whose singular tweet about Valerie Jarrett costs her the highest-rated show on television; or any of the millions of Trump supporters whom the liberal pundits have repeatedly labeled as Nazis and worse.

The public’s faith in the press is abysmal, an unsurprising metric given the media’s obvious and escalating radicalism. One can only hope, if for no other reason than to save their own skins, that today’s pundits and media professionals will take a step back and rethink their war on a major percentage of the American population.

But as the Jeong saga and countless other episodes clearly demonstrate, such hope is likely little more than wishful thinking.